First Ever Metal 3D Printed Faucets, American Standard Releases

by Tracy WongJune 16, 2015

By Scott Grunewald Via 3DPrint

When it comes to design, there really is no limit to the imagination. Unfortunately, there is a limit to how much of a designer’s imagination can actually be brought into the real world and turned into a physical object. The limitations of modern fabrication and manufacturing loom large over any product designer’s thought process like a storm cloud, perpetually threatening to rain all over their best ideas. When you need to create objects by casting them in molds or by using CNC machines, there are geometries that are simply never going to work. Limitations aren’t always a bad thing of course, often times working around problems can stir a designer’s creativity the way nothing else can. But advances in 3D printing technology are redefining what limitations designers need to work under.

American Standard Brands, one of the largest brands in kitchen and bathroom hardware, has just unveiled a new line of metal 3D printed faucets that seem too impossible to actually function. Using a selective laser sintering (SLS) 3D printing process, American Standard has produced some truly stunning kitchen hardware that makes it seem as if the water appears from nowhere. The SLS process allows designers to fabricate objects using geometries that could never be achieved using standard casting techniques.